Learning from a Project “Post –mortem”

 

Project “Post-mortem” is one way to learn best practices and avoid mistakes on a future project through reviewing the results and activities from a project that has been completed ( Walden University, 2011).

Last year I’ve completed as a project manager a project for building three technical courses for a major customer. Each course should include text book, presentation materials, practical activities, daily quizzes, and pre / post assessments. The customer representative was a PhD SME with over 35 years of experience. He gave me one page of course outlines for each course and asked for an initial feedback including:

1- Instructional designer and / or Instructor resume.

2- Detailed course objectives, outlines, chapters’ brief draft summaries.

3- Proposed time-line for completing each course.

After submitting all required information, we agreed to start the execution phase for each course. Our customer requested from us to send him chapter by chapter to revise before proceeding. I’ve started the project with two out of town teams and one in town ID and I was liaising between them and the client. This job appeared to be a nightmare; each chapter took at least four rounds of revisions before it gets signed off. The customer turned to be so picky and used to take a very long time in revising the material, correcting the grammar and sentences before even the technical information and only considers his point of view whether right or wrong. With this situation in mind, off course, we missed all timelines and we took almost double the required scheduled time to complete the job. The customer refused to compensate us for the extra work and he actually accused us of being the reason behind delay. The project ended up with a successful delivery however my company suffered a high financial burden from this project. 

Today, when I look back at this agreement I realize how the project management course could have helped me to better manage that project and complete it within budget as well. As described by Portny et al, (2008), pp. 85, I managed to provide the customer with a brief description of the tasks to be performed and the qualifications, skills and knowledge that my ID consultants have.

However, I never had a Statement of Work (SOW) completed and signed from both parties, to generally describe work assignments for the project. I also believe that I would definitely have had less problems and better project time management if I had the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) in place and agreed upon with the customer. WBS is an organized detailed and hierarchical representation of all work to be performed in the project. For my project , it was exactly what I needed to eliminate the multiple draft revisions and save a lot of time. In spite the fact that some people look at detailed the WBS and decide that they make projects more complex than they really are, my project is a clear example that, by clearly portraying all aspects of the work to be done, WBS actually simplifies the project (Portny et al, 2008) and reduce conflicts with the client.

Also one of learned lessons was that I, being the project manager, should have had a “kick off meeting” to clarify deliverables, roles and responsibilities of team members, obtain specific commitment of each team member to complete assigned tasks according to schedule and budget constraints, and make sure all team members have what they need to start work (Greer, 2010).

References

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! (Laureate custom ed.). Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Walden University, (2011). Blog Assignment: Learning from a Project “Post- mortem”.